Li-Ming Hu

Combining narration, reenactment, found footage, karaoke, animation and a sprinkling of augmented reality, Li-Ming Hu’s Can it be I’m not meant to play this part? explores representation, identity and cultural production through the artist’s experiences as a professional actor and emerging artist, in conversation with key moments in the history of Asian American theater.

Works cited (in order of appearance):

Trailer for the 2020 film Mulan, directed by Niki Caro

“Reflection,” performed by Lea Salonga, from Disney's 1998 animated film Mulan (Wilder and Zippel).

Interview with Lea Salonga, Jonathan Pryce and Terry Wogan, BBC, 1989.

Photos of 1990 Miss Saigon protests by Corky Lee

Final scene of M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, directed by David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons. Music 'Everything is Destroyed' by Howard Shore and a Casiotone cover of 'Un Bel Di Vedremo' by Puccini (from his opera Madame Butterfly)

Site specific performance at Socrates Sculpture Park,, 2023.

I walked the perimeter of the park while reading reviews of it that had been published on online forums such as Yelp, google reviews and tripadvisor.

Hi Gail,

I am looking for a Presenter to front a series of 15” TVC’s on asian food.

We want this person to be young, fun and engaging.

I think Li-Ming would be perfect.

The TVC’s would only be on air for a few weeks each at quite low weights – a mix of peak and off peak. This would initially be 3 x 15” but would develop into a series.

Is this something she may be interested in??

Any queries please let me know.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

Rachel

A live performance centered around a digital ‘How to Get More Shows’ presentation and sales pitch for a paid monthly artist membership service, which took place is a custom built installation at Te Tuhi, New Zealand. It begins with me delivering opening remarks from curator Vera Mey, (who is depicted on the mask and could not be there in person), then moves to a live call to my friend while I change costume. The next phases is a reenactment of the ‘How to Get More Shows’ video talk, ending with a karaoke version of ‘Defy Gravity’ with fellow artist Fu-On Chung, using a custom made face filter based on the Tretchikoff painting Chinese Girl.

Photos by Misong Kim.

Commissioned by Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand for the exhibition ‘Elsewhere and Nowhere Else’ curated by Vera Mey.

“Li-Ming Hu presents the video Boney (Phoney?) M (2020) and a new performance and video installation “Where is the art? (2022) which comprises a scale replica of Hu’s New York studio. Persistent in her practice is an energetic exuberance and mimesis of found, still and moving image material, which Hu ‘dubs’ over in drag and masquerade. Through employing a carnivalesque sensibility, Hu’s practice alerts us to an inherent duality of absurdity and melancholy in culture – in both its creation and consumption. Carnival as a ritualised spectacle of chaos has been theorised as a space which is a “culturally hybridised, inter-ethnic festival of popular artistic creativity and social critique”.[5] The revelry of carnival serves multiple functions, including the invoking of spirits and characters, catharsis from social rank and destabilisation of hierarchies, and as a radical form of biting critique as resistance.

Within Hu’s installation Where is the art? (2022), humour can be seen as a mechanism of critique, exposure and melancholy. In this studio environment we are alerted to a heightened sense of fabrication, with artistic equipment appearing as props made of fur or in blatant replication. A monitor with a video partly shot in the fabricated studio itself details the duality of the artistic process: it is riddled with sincere self-doubt in terms of creating, but also includes a re-enactment of an artist networking education programme that Hu found online – a business course on how to communicate and market yourself as an artist. The interchangeability of signifiers within the installation is furthered through a custom made face filter based on Vladimir Tretchikoff’s iconic ‘Chinese Girl’ painting, applied to the faces of the artists in the exhibition and the curator. Though Hu’s processes of re-enactment are often odd and awkward, the act of masquerade is also one of respectful homage towards these figures, a kind of embodiment through charismatic persona. There is a layering of masquerade on the screen, on the walls, through a face filter and the performing body of the artist herself.” Vera Mey

Two person show with Maryam Faridani at Roots & Culture Chicago, 2021

Art Drips From Each Of Her Fingers: ” Az har angoshtesh ye honar mirize” is a Persian idiom to describe a person of wide-ranging skills or great versatility; a person of many talents, but mostly used in reference to girls to highlight their marriageability.

For Maryam and Li-Ming, it is an exercise in wish fulfilment. If their fingers are dripping with art, their immigration status anxiety might be relieved with an artist visa, which requires proving extraordinary ability. How much you’ve been institutionally approved, how many letters you can get from artists, curators and critics attesting to your extraordinary ability, how many extraordinary opportunities you can project for the next three years, and how many art related dollars you have to make for each of those years at a $20,000 minimum.

And then, if the visa is obtained, how to maintain that extraordinariness? And what happens when more attention is paid to the fingers than to the art that is dripping out of them?

Li-Ming Hu is a Chinese New Zealander and, as a child of immigrants who had mixed attitudes to assimilation, does not speak any of the Chinese languages . Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of our high performance culture, and the relationships between cultural production and the construction of subjectivities. She does not know what color emojis to use.

Maryam Faridani is an Iranian Iranian and, as a child of non-immigrants, speaks Farsi, not Arabic as Li-Ming initially thought. By using moving images, installations and performance, she tries to explore how the given technical systems today lead to the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the environment of that system. She uses brown emojis.

Video made for the exhibition Artist Run Chicago 2.0 at Hyde Park Art Center celebrating the work of 50 artist-run spaces and organizations. The cast comprises the founders/organizers of each of the spaces represented in the show.

Song: I'm Every Woman, written by Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson, performed by Chaka Khan.

Location camera by Jesse Bond.

Chic. Donna Summer. Sylvester. Boney M. Hang on, who the fuck are they? Eurodisco was a thing, Munich in the 70s was one of the places. Four good looking Carribean migrants (Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, Bobby Farrell, Maizie Williams), one white German producer (Frank Farian). With some similarity to the Moroder/Summer formula, they stormed the charts in much of Europe and Australasia, but never cracked the US. The music is stupendous (according to Li-Ming anyways) and the story - who wrote, who sang, who looked the part and who got the credit - equally so.

Overseas artists wanting to stay in the US and being unable to obtain a US spouse, or having the misfortune of already being married to another foreign national, must apply every three years for an artist visa, known officially as the O1B: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement. Alongside an eye-wateringly larger list of professional accomplishments, applicants also need press, which seems to be an Achilles Heel for a number of incredibly talented artists. Enter Lori Waxman, renowned art historian and critic who, in association with her project 60 WRD/MIN will write reviews free of charge for artists in need, live over the course of three Saturdays (Feb 1, 15 & 22) from 3-8pm.

Lori will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the April issue of Lumpen, and will remain on view here throughout the duration of DISCOmbobulation.

Four to the floor. Mirror balls. Glamour, razzle, artifice, dancing with whomever. Boy on boy on boy on girl on girl on all the in betweens. A gorgeous hybrid of funk, pop, soul and salsa born who knows where, partially at least in the house parties of David Mancuso and the underground club culture where those not riding the white hetero bus could party unmolested.

Having worked with various forms of pop music and the attendant pathos, tragicomedy, melodrama and at times involuntary humor, it’s no great surprise that Li-Ming has turned to disco as a lens with which to explore ideas of cultural production and authenticity, the transmission of cultural forms and diasporic and artistic identities (and how one may lose, or profit from such identifications).

On July 12 1979 around 50,000 people converged at Comiskey Park for the infamous Disco Demolition, where White Sox promoters and a disgruntled radio DJ flogged 98c tickets if people brought disco records to blow up between games. A riot ensued, and it’s become known as the night disco died. Forty years on, it continues to be read by some as a harmless prank and others as a hate filled moment of homophobia and racism.

An exercise in self-performance via three interview contexts: the art school promotion, the fan webseries and the (make believe) art magazine feature.

A site/context specific work generated for the SAIC Impact Performance Festival that was hosted by Dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery at the Zhou B Art Center.

There are four floors in the center: the third contains artist studios, the second a multi purpose space rented out for exhibitions, performances, weddings, & church services. The first contains a permanent exhibition of works by the Zhou Brothers, various promotional material about them, a cafe area, and another multipurpose space for rent.

The basement contains more studios and exhibition space, and this is where this work was shown.

There were three sections which we cycled between for 3 hours: a recreation of a Comic Con autograph booth, where I ate soup while half heartedly peddling autographs; a casting studio where performers wearing masks of me auditioned for various film & television roles, and a response to the Zhou Brothers, whose gallery was hired by the school as a performance venue. Elements included a reproduction of a display of one of their artist monographs (with my name instead), replicas of banners hung outside the gallery (with my face superimposed), a large faux fur replica of a self published book on the art center and a reenactment of a television interview they did with a local Chicago news station. The background projection is a promotional video for the Art Center that is permanently on display in the gallery lobby.

Durational performance, 2018

Every year, Chicago arts magazine NewCity runs a Breakout Artist feature, with the byline ‘Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers’.

For the New Blood Performance Festival at Links Hall, I offered visitors the chance to pose for their own Breakout Artist cover shoot, and create their own artist blurb, which was composed of existing text from previous NewCity  features. This was then put into a template, printed out and attached to a ‘real’ New City Magazine, which they could take away with them when they left the event.

What happens when you get off the plane at ORD instead of LAX?

Is your career fucked forever? Or is there some small consolation to be had in make believe and gaudily packaged fizzy water?

Video exhibited as part of installation.

Cast includes SAIC faculty Robin Deacon, Ellen Rothenberg and Mark Jeffery, as well as LA artists Martine Syms and John Baldessari.

2016

Installation/video/performance

Gotta keep a link with your tradition
Gotta learn to trust your intuition
While you re-establish your position
So that you can be on exhibit...
So that your work can be on exhibition

‘Putting it together’, Stephen Sondheim, Sundays in the Park with George

Barbara Streisand does Stephen Sondheim from a musical on the pointillist painter George Seurat. She tweaked a few lyrics to make it more relevant for her Broadway album but the points are all there. Add The Pet Shop Boys’ languid vocal combination of self pity and self knowledge and half my work is done for me. If only. 

Music a combination of 'Putting it together' written by Stephen Sondheim and performed by Barbra Streisand, and 'What have I done to deserve this' written and performed by The Pet Shop Boys.

Exhibited as part of an installation for Seagers Walters Prize, Mirage Gallery, September 2016. The main character/object of desire in the video is Adnan Yildiz, director of Artspace NZ and judge of the competition. I didn't win but he liked it. The other faces aside from me in drag are my fellow prize entrants.

Song: 'Loverboy' written by Keith Diamond, Billy Ocean, performed by Billy Ocean.

It seemed a good idea at the time, but/ I can’t do it alone

I’ve been interested in the performance of artistic identity for a while now, so it seemed a good idea to explore this through the lens of the artist-run space, something now considered a necessary rite of passage for any artist who wants to hit the big time or, at least, keep making art beyond the comfort of the tertiary institution.

In a fleeting moment of optimism bordering on invincibility (the feeling at least), I thought it might be a good idea to run my own artist run space as a durational performance. A spate of eye twitching, sleep depriving anxiety followed. Where to find the space? And the people to help run it? And the art? And to do it all in an ethical critically productive manner? Which sent me running, quick fast, back into the arms of my old friend, make believe. Enter Tracey, a show tune and the cake, a burlesque side show to make the nitty gritty more bearable, and some fake/real friends along for the ride. 

The idea of pursuing desire in fantasy narratives is not new in my work, but the incorporation of outisde parties, without their consent, even approval, is. It is testing my boundaries of performance (be careful what you wish for), and adding another dimension to already tenuous relationships which, admittedly, may not have existed otherwise. Is going for coffee with some gallery directors part of the performance? Yes! How do I document this? Not sure yet! The email taped to the wall? Maybe. 

I asked a few artist run spaces if I could pretend their space is mine for a bit. One said yes, one stopped answering my emails, one said no but offered me a fish tank instead. I found a name, got a sign made, and soft launched my space, here, but quietly, so not many people noticed. The next step, I am told, is to put on a show with art other than my own, i.e. work with real people, life size cut outs not excepted, an experiment in ‘pretend’ collaboration in which the pretend is bound, in some way, to fracture into a form of reality.

But what is this “town” but a fantasy world of strange looking characters with similar hopes and dreams. Some call it the “art world” with that slow ominous tone that conjures up some magical but crooked place, which just happens to share the same physical location as Auckland, New Zealand.  The physical location doesn’t even matter really – geography becomes irrelevant because it only exists in the minds of the characters within it! How’s that for a plot twist! 

Who are these characters? (The artists, the writers, the musicians, the poets, the dancers, the ‘creative practitioners’, the galleries, the artist-run-initiated-project-spaces, the art schools, the high schools, the primary schools with their over-inflated “Art Cups” - have all of these characters just been drinking from a water source that was contaminated by a 1:1 mixture of toxic narcissism and insecurity? 

I think that exaggerating the myth of these relatively recognisable artists to such an extent – (running ‘auditions’ for what could be a blockbuster bio-pic about the people involved in Gambia Castle and their eventual rise to fame) does two things: 

1. It inflates their public personas to such a ridiculous extent that they burst and we 

realise that the myth we had constructed about them is not realistic, and 

2. It exposes the dormant hero-worship that we didn’t even know was affecting the way we see ourselves and our own ambitions.

All this makes light of the performative aspect of being an artist and making art – Andy Warhol was mainly a convincing artwork about celebrity – Paul McCarthy only captured Willem De Kooning when he wielded a comically oversized paintbrush. 

I don’t think of this work as parody, I think of it as fictional role-play. The links between desiring and being are a major concern of Li-Ming’s work, and the masks provide a quick and dirty – yet surprisingly effective – means of self-transformation. 

Casting Call not only brings the desired others closer to home (previous works have featured appearances by Rod Stewart, Vito Acconci, Whitney Houston, and Martin Kippenberger), but also extends the opportunity of becoming someone else to the audience. But with opportunity comes risk, and maybe what we're being offered is the chance to enact success, and then to fail, gloriously, together.

Daphne Simons & Li-Ming Hu

Video/installation/performance exhibited at Auckland University of Technology, 2015. 

FrontBox, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland NZ, 2015. 

Till now I always got by on my own

I never really cared until I met you

And now it chills me to the bone

How do I get you alone

How do I get you alone                  Alone, Heart

Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly may have written it, but Heart, who released it on their 1987 album Bad Animals, owned it. Ann Wilson’s vocals channel a thousand ‘no answer on the telephone’ moments, while sister guitarist Nancy leaves solo duties to Howard Leese – rhythm was more her thing, she says so herself. Youtube their video for big hair, puffed sleeves and pelvic guitaring. Can 52,669,923 million people be wrong? 

Songs, and there have been a few power ballads among them, form the centre of many of Li-Ming Hu’s installations. Get the balance right (or wrong, depending on how you see it) and there’s a mix of pathos, tragicomedy and melodrama that can also be hysterically funny. Desire is pursued in fantasy narratives that seemed destined for failure. It’s a rough ride.

In Li-Ming’s work the line between appropriate and inappropriate types of performance, between appropriation and behaving appropriately, is frequently returned to. Shooting Blanks takes ejaculation both as a verb and as a metaphor – for mark making, performance, and in a parody of patriarchal conquest.  

Pop music and celebrity persona offer the narrative material for a site where it’s hard to tell where and when the performance begins and ends. The objects and moving image on display can be seen as both artefacts of performance and performing in their own right. The window site complicates this further – street facing, it can be difficult to locate it in the context of the gallery interior, and here it operates as both a ‘backstage’ and an acutely public situation. 

Live performances occur intermittently throughout the exhibition.

Installation/video/performance exhibited at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, NZ, 2015. 

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She just wants someone to love her. She just wants to be an artist too. Neither of these things is straightforward. Firstly, there’s so much baggage. Like, so much art already. So much music too. Not enough lovers. Real ones anyway. But imaginary ones do quite nicely a lot of the time. Paul was quite lovely, so, so handsome and so good at casting. His processional work blah blah. Though I found it harder to connect with Martin and never really felt like he was taking us seriously. Thomas influenced me more than I initially realised and as for Healthcliff – what a dickbag. So glad I have my sisters: Kate, Emily, Eleanor, I couldn’t have done it without them. 

So many objects too, but got to keep making them. Piles of production, someone said, I’ll take it. 

They said theatrical? They’re going to fucking get it.